So, I picked up one of those $100 Toshiba HD-A2 players Wal-Mart had a year ago. I finally got my first HD TV, the Sammy, about 3 weeks ago. I bought Transformers on HD DVD this past weekend at a sale I found. I had yet to watch any HD DVDs on the new TV. The problem I'm having is getting the zoom right to show the proper aspect ratio of the movie I'm watching. On my standard DVD player, I usually have it set to Zoom 1, but with my HD player, Zoom 1 and Zoom 2 are unavailable, so the movies are all stretched wide no matter what I have it set on, except for 4:3, but that just makes the picture small in the center of the screen. The picture being stretched like that really drives me nuts. Is this an issue with TV settings or something with the HD player or what??

So, I picked up one of those $100 Toshiba HD-A2 players Wal-Mart had a year ago. I finally got my first HD TV, the Sammy, about 3 weeks ago. I bought Transformers on HD DVD this past weekend at a sale I found. I had yet to watch any HD DVDs on the new TV. The problem I'm having is getting the zoom right to show the proper aspect ratio of the movie I'm watching. On my standard DVD player, I usually have it set to Zoom 1, but with my HD player, Zoom 1 and Zoom 2 are unavailable, so the movies are all stretched wide no matter what I have it set on, except for 4:3, but that just makes the picture small in the center of the screen. The picture being stretched like that really drives me nuts. Is this an issue with TV settings or something with the HD player or what??
You shouldn't be zooming anything. Transformers has an aspect ratio of
2.35 : 1. It should be letterboxed.

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/images/c/cd/AR235.jpg

So, I picked up one of those $100 Toshiba HD-A2 players Wal-Mart had a year ago. I finally got my first HD TV, the Sammy, about 3 weeks ago. I bought Transformers on HD DVD this past weekend at a sale I found. I had yet to watch any HD DVDs on the new TV. The problem I'm having is getting the zoom right to show the proper aspect ratio of the movie I'm watching. On my standard DVD player, I usually have it set to Zoom 1, but with my HD player, Zoom 1 and Zoom 2 are unavailable, so the movies are all stretched wide no matter what I have it set on, except for 4:3, but that just makes the picture small in the center of the screen. The picture being stretched like that really drives me nuts. Is this an issue with TV settings or something with the HD player or what??

It appears you have failed to set your player to the 16:9 TV option in the player menu and the player is defaulted to accomodate a 4:3 TV. What a shame you have been watching lower resolution images stretched all this time.

It's also frightening to think that a huge percentage of first time adopters of Bly-Ray and HDTVs are doing this very thing wondering why HDTV doesn't look very good.

It appears you have failed to set your player to the 16:9 TV option in the player menu and the player is defaulted to accomodate a 4:3 TV. What a shame you have been watching lower resolution images stretched all this time.

Like I said, this is the first time I've watched an HD DVD movie on an HDTV. When I got the player a year ago, I still just had a standard 4:3 SDTV.

So it's my player settings? Thank you. That's what I was asking.

+1 to what jrcorwin and Amused said - don't zoom just return the player's settings to 16:9 (and set your new Sammy to Just Scan). Are you using HDMI to connected them?

Since you have a HD DVD player you might want to look for a favorite HD DVD in 1.85:1 which should fill the screen just about right. Heck since discs are still available very cheap online (many used ones for under $5) it's a good time to build up a small library of favorite titles in HD. I sure have been.

Like I said, this is the first time I've watched an HD DVD movie on an HDTV. When I got the player a year ago, I still just had a standard 4:3 SDTV.

So it's my player settings? Thank you. That's what I was asking.
Ahh...I see. Well, adjust the setup for your player and check back in.

+1 to what jrcorwin and Amused said - don't zoom just return the player's settings to 16:9 (and set your new Sammy to Just Scan). Are you using HDMI to connected them?

HDMI for my HD player and S-Video for my standard.

Since you have a HD DVD player you might want to look for a favorite HD DVD in 1.85:1 which should fill the screen just about right. Heck since discs are still available very cheap online (many used ones for under $5) it's a good time to build up a small library of favorite titles in HD. I sure have been.

I wasn't trying to fill the screen with the movie. I know that I'll still have black bars on most of my movies. That's fine. I was just trying to get the picture to not be distorted.

It was just a boneheaded oops on my end by forgetting to set my players to 16:9 instead of 4:3. I never really thought about it with my standard player because I was able to get them to fit without being distorted or cut off.

I got both my players properly set to 16:9 now and all is right with the world. :D